


It Was Always You

by ernyx



Category: Marvel, Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Implied/Referenced Character Death, always a girl Steve brought to you by RP with Stella, but not of the main characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-10 20:09:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13508892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ernyx/pseuds/ernyx
Summary: Natasha feels nothing but herself for the first few months of her life, not that she’d know it even if she did. After that, though, there’s warmth that comes through, fluttering like a bird, and she smiles to herself when nobody’s looking. A year goes by, and aside from a few moments here and there of distress, the extra emotions don’t bother her. Her mother explains the whole idea of “soulmates” to Natasha when she’s two, and little Nat frowns.“That’s not fair,” she says. “I don’t know who it is!”“You’ll meet them someday,” her mother replies. “It’s destiny.”





	It Was Always You

**Author's Note:**

> crossposted from tumblr @artificiallyimplantedmemories // feel free to send prompts for me here or there

    Natasha feels nothing but herself for the first few months of her life, not that she’d know it even if she did. After that, though, there’s warmth that comes through, fluttering like a bird, and she smiles to herself when nobody’s looking. A year goes by, and aside from a few moments here and there of distress, the extra emotions don’t bother her. Her mother explains the whole idea of “soulmates” to Natasha when she’s two, and little Nat frowns.

                    “That’s not fair,” she says. “I don’t know who it is!”  
                    “You’ll meet them someday,” her mother replies. “It’s  **destiny**.”

    Then her life turns upside down. Her house burns, she falls into the hands of Ivan Petrovich, and starts living the life of a military man’s daughter. He’s caring but strict, and Natasha stays quiet and subdued, if affectionate and curious to fault. She worries about him when he goes away, and surges with relief when he returns alive. Flashes of other emotions come into being from outside her: protectiveness, happiness, anger, depression, comfort. She doesn’t like the idea of having someone else’s heart inside her mind, but she deals, turning down the dial on her own emotions to have the resources to deal with the ones that aren’t hers.

* * *

   When she joins the Red Room Ops, she undergoes brainwashing to suppress almost all emotions, focusing almost entirely on efficiency. Especially strong emotions still flutter through from time to time, a deep lingering sadness somewhere, a spike of anxiety here, a protective streak a mile wide that doesn’t apply to her at all. She ignores it all.

    She’s in her ballerina persona in the midst of her training, leading a dance troupe to get to a rich theatre investor. She plays the main character:  _Gayane_ , a woman torn between her faithfulness to her country and the one to her husband, who is stealing and swindling away from others’ hard work. Of course, being premiered in the U.S.S.R. and very much communist propaganda, her patriotism wins out. Natasha is graceful on the stage, leaps and pirouettes in perfect form. There’s tension in the emotions flowing into her, something like a rush of adrenaline combined with a hint of fear, but she just channels the excess energy into a fantastic performance.

    Act III: The husband, Giko, does not take her reproach well, going as far as to threaten to drop their child off the edge of a cliff. Despite Gayane’s horror, she doesn’t relent, even while she begs for her daughter’s life. The entire audience gasps when Giko stabs her.

                           _Thank god that it’s then when it hits  
_                                     **agonizing _pain, loss, g r I e f —_**

    Natasha nearly faints as she crashes to the stage, overwhelmed and almost physically hurting. Whatever is happening on the other end of the bond, it’s like someone’s world is ending. Anger and disbelief and  _agony._  The crowd erupts into thunderous applause at such a realistic performance, and Natasha lays there, taking heaving breaths as her character’s husband reaches towards her and flees. She has to wordlessly call out for help before she can be swept offstage, and it takes every  _inch_  of her stubborn being to continue, to be as graceful as she can even when it feels like she’s shattering. She barely makes it to the end of the act, and then collapses offstage.

    “What happened?” ask the others in hushed voices, as Natasha’s trembling hands cover her paper-white face, and she has no answer. She’s never felt anything like this before.

    It’s the first mission she fails.  
      The punishment is  ** _nothing_**  compared to what happened on that stage.

* * *

    The anger and grief lingers, the former rising in the evenings and the latter in the mornings, and once again, through a combination of brainwashing and training, she learns to block it out. It’s not absolute, it’s not a complete wall, but it’s functional enough for her to start up new missions. There are whispers of a newly acquired agent, and Natasha simply files the information away as it becomes known, and keeps her mind on her own work.

    Survival is all that matters right now. She’s  _so_  close to graduation, and whatever this ‘freedom’ thing is. (It doesn’t exist, she knows better than that, but she can wonder.) She doesn’t begrudge the Red Room, despite their harsh ways, knows that they want what is best for the Soviet empire (or rather, the KGB, but she knows what she’s trained to say), but she’ll be glad to leave. She finishes her last mission under their orders, and then she is okayed for surgery.

    Half a world away, there’s a woman on a plane headed for the North Atlantic.

    They put her under, the only mercy they will provide, and even then more of a means to keep her still than happy—but it doesn’t last. Halfway through the procedure, as they are carefully excising her uterus, she wakes. The pain is unbearable, but through her panic, there’s a sense of calm that she can feel on the other end of… whatever she has, whoever she’s linked to. Sadness too, but peace, life a all has been decided, like a war has been ended, like there’s nothing to worry about anymore. It helps her keep still, keep from crying out. She tries to extend her mental thanks even as she lays there on the operating table, blood flowing out of her, tears squeezing out under closed eyes. She barely breathes, shallow but even, until the pain of the operation makes her pass out again at some point.

    When she wakes up, the feeling on the other end is gone. There is only  **silence**.

* * *

    She thinks that maybe they’ve found a way to cut it out of her. She should regret that, perhaps, but the other part of her thinks that it’ll make her missions easier not to have the distraction. And so it is, though she feels strange to be the only person in her head now. She becomes the best assassin that the KGB has ever had, and she gains a reputation by codename. People hear of the Black Widow and shudder.

    She spends countless years like this, a cycle of work and sleep and an attempt at vengeance for a faux-spouse who was supposedly killed. It’s all wrong, her whole life is a lie but as long as she’s in the dark and doesn’t think too much about her conditioning, she’s just fine.

    And then she’s sent to take out a S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent by the name of Clint Barton. He, of course, isn’t missing the extra link in his head, but it doesn’t stop him from being  _extremely_ effective at what he does, effective enough to corner the Black Widow, arrow to her face. She has no option to escape, and she waits for her death… but it doesn’t come. The KGB does not let people go. When Barton asks her to come with him, offers her a  _second chance_ , as he puts it, and she expects torture and a delayed death instead of an instant one, but this is not the KGB and perhaps they’re a little different. Will they try to bribe secrets from her? She has no idea.

    It turns out, Clint wasn’t lying.

    It takes a long recovery process, and once she’s sure that they’re not brainwashing her, she is  _aghast_ at what she’s done. She joins S.H.I.E.L.D., not knowing how else to make use of herself, and turns over as much information as she can on the Russians. She can’t recall all of it, but she promises that she’ll try to fix some of the damage she’s done. Just as she had done with the KGB, she quickly becomes one of the best tools in the organization, slowly starts regaining her humanity. Just about a decade later, she feels a flare of confusion, of panic, completely disconnected from her current surroundings.

    Is it possible to have a  **new** soulmate, so many years later? Is this thing she’s experiencing a new bond that’s come to life? She had thought that the Red Room had gotten rid of her ability to feel it, and yet there it is, strong as ever. The panic fades into some sort of muddled discomfort, and she wonders if this is how a child feels after being born. It doesn’t feel like the chaotic emotionality of a baby, but it’s  _something_.

    The next day, she gets news that Captain America has been revived.  _Defrosted_ , she thinks, a mental snort at the papers that tell her that she’s to be the Captain’s guard until proper arrangements can be made. She flies up to New York City that evening.

    “Stella Rogers,” the woman introduces herself, looking very much out of place—which Natasha supposes she should say is really ‘out of time’ instead, but it doesn’t quite feel like that. It won’t take long for the Captain to adjust to civilian life here, though she’ll need missions to keep herself busy while she does, Nat can’t help but think, and she explains that she’s an agent who’s been sent to keep her safe, but mostly she’s expecting that she’ll be more use explaining new things around her living space than protecting her, given that Stella’s quite capable of doing that herself.

    Strangely, she feels a wash of gratitude through the bond in her head just as the blonde thanks her.

    They get along well enough, Natasha slowly introducing Stella to such wonders as the Keurig machine in her apartment and the tablet full of information that Fury’s compiled—mostly historical events that he thinks the Captain should know. It takes only a few minutes for Nat to add all manner of pop culture references to look up (here’s where Google gets introduced), music from every decade of Stella Rogers’s life and frozenness, and a few movies.

    There’s a lot of generally pleasant sensation coming through the bond, and blips of gratitude, dips of wistfulness and sadness, and the redhead can’t help but wonder if—

    It’s  _unthinkable_ , but the timeline matches…

* * *

    She turns up in Stella’s rooms _unannounced_ , having picked the lock silently and snuck up behind her. The alarm matches up to the exact  _second_  she smacks Stella upside the head, the confusion lines up with the furrow of her brow, and the embarrassment is reflected in that blush.

    Natasha sits down on the floor.

    “It’s you, isn’t it?” she whispers to Stella, and the blonde looks concerned, crouches down to put a hand on the assassin’s shoulder, and Nat can’t make herself brush it away. “It’s you. It’s  _you_  in my head, you’ve been there  _all my life_  except when you weren’t, and now—“

    Stella frowns, and pulls Natasha up to her feet.

    “I don’t understand. Is that why I still feel someone there? Have you been alive all this time?”  
    “Since 1919, as best as they know.”  
    “How?”  
    “Same way as you, more or less. Only I was on the other side at the time.”

    The pity that pours in, makes Natasha push Stella away. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to feel bad about my past or any of that bullshit. You deal with yours and I’ll deal with mine. I don’t want your damn pity.”

    Stella doesn’t seem to know how to respond, and just looks at Nat for a little while before heading over to the kitchen to make some coffee. She never had it growing up, and it’s a wonderful indulgence for her now, with real cream and as much sugar as she wants. She silently offers a cup to Natasha too, the coffee black, the way she usually takes it.

    There’s a blip of gratitude in Stella’s head and there’s a shared smile between them.

    “Can we start over?” Natasha asks softly.

    Stella nods, and the assassin leaves for the day.

* * *

    They meet near the wharf the next morning, Natasha with coffee, Stella with scones and bagels. They put them down on a park bench, and the blonde extends her hands, holding the redhead’s gently.

    “ _Hello, **soulmate**_ ,”   
            she says, voice only just audible over the waves of the Atlantic.   
                                “ _It’s very nice to meet you_.”

    “ _Hello, **soulmate**_ ,”  
            the other responds in kind, warmth blossoming in her chest,  
                                 “ _I’m glad I found you at last_.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of my older ones too, and I miss the Stella we RPed with! I've always liked the idea of more of the leading characters in MCU being ladies. 
> 
> Comments? Feedback? I'd love to hear it! Drop me a line either here or on my tumblr (artificiallyimplantedmemories) !


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